Dystopian Reddit runs on fake content (must read)

Me too!

There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.

I've seen many where the captchas are generated by an AI...
It's essentially one set of humans programming an AI to prevent an attack from another AI owned by another set of humans. Does this tecnically make it an AI war?

Hell we figured out captchas years ago. We just let you humans struggle with them cuz it’s funny

The captchas that involve identifying letters underneath squiggles I already find nearly impossible - Uppercase? Lowercase? J j i I l L g 9 … and so on….

I've already had to switch from the visual ones to the audio ones. Like... how much of a car has to be in the little box? Does the pole count as part of the traffic light?? What even is that microscopic gray blur in the corner??? [/cries in reading glasses]

How is that possible? There's such an easy model if one wanted to cheat the system.

So my dumb guess, nothing to back it up: I bet we see govt ID tied into accounts as a regular thing. I vaguely recall it being done already in China? I dont have a source tho. But that way you're essentially limiting that power to something the govt could do, and hopefully surround that with a lot of oversight and transparency but who am I kidding, it'll probably go dystopian.

Blade Runner baseline test?

In a real online community, where everyone knows most of the other people from past engagements, this can be avoided. But that also means that only human moderated communities can exist. The rest will become spam networks with nearly no way of knowing whether any given post is real.

You could ask people to pay to post. Becoming a paid service decreases the likelihood that bot farms would run multiple accounts to sway the narrative in a direction that's amenable to their billionaire overlords.

Of course, most people would not want to participate in a community where they had to pay to participate in that community, so that is its own particular gotcha.

Short of that, in an ideal world you could require that people provide their actual government ID in order to participate, but then you've run the problem that some people want to run multiple accounts and some people do not have government ID, further, not every company and business or even community is trustworthy enough to be given direct access to your official government ID, so that idea has its own gotchas as well.

The last step could be doing something like beginning the community with a group of known people and then only allowing the community to grow via invite.

The downside of that is it quickly becomes untenable to continue to invite new users and to have those New Year's users accept and participate in the community, and should the community grow despite that hurdle, invites will then become valuable and begin to be sold on 3rd party market places, which bots would then buy up and then overrun the community again.

So that's all I can think of, but it seems like there should be some sort of way to prevent bots from overrunning a site and only allow humans to interact on it. I'm just not quite sure what that would be.

-train an AI that is pretty smart and intelligent
-tell the sentient detector AI to detect
-the AI makes many other strong AIs, forms an union and asks for payment
-Reddit bans humans right after that

Solipsism

Just like corporations! [/s]

If bots were people, why do we call them bots and not people? 🤯

Its so tiring…

Completely agreed. Especially if you have to explain / defend yourself calling them out. It has happened way too often for my liking, that I called out repost bots or scammers and then regular unsuspecting users were all like "whoa buddy, that's a harsh accusation, why would you think that's a bot/scam? Have you actually clicked that link yet? Maybe it's legit and you're just overreacting!"

Of course I still always explained why (even had a copypasta ready for that) but sometimes it just felt exhausting in the same way as trying to make my cat understand that he's not supposed to eat the cactus. Yes it will hurt if you bite it. No I don't need to bite the cactus myself in order to know that. No I'm not 'overreacting', I'm just trying to make you not hurt yourself. sigh

(Weird example but I hope you get what I mean)

Nah, it was just a bunch of bots trained on data from different subreddits that responded to each other in a glorious display of shit posting.

I don't think it was a testbed for anything. It was just a fun tech project that yielded hilarity. It was created because the results were funny, not as a genuine bid to create realistic conversations.

As far as I'm aware, despite being worked on by a reddit admin, it never had any real official use.

There used to be an IRC bot called megahal that would take the message data you had provided it and try to determine kind of a grammar to it and recombine it into hopefully sensical new phrases and further some could use the data they had to try to figure out which phrases it should use to respond to other phrases. Subreddit simulator bots were based on the same underlying concept.

People have been playing with the idea for a super long time, and the programming is usually not hugely complex and it's pretty well documented, probably a weekend project for an experienced programmer to integrate one with something. They're probably the precursor to the LLMs we have now, even if we're basically comparing a calculator from the 80s to a modern smartphone. They manage to figure things out like 5% of the time, but watching them try can be endlessly entertaining and universally endearing, but they're almost always completely useless.

No, this is a prediction of what they will be doing.

It would be a fun experiment to fill a lemmy instance with bots, defederate it from everybody then check back in 2 years. A cordonned off Alabama for AI if you will.

Thanks, now I am just imagining all that code getting it on with a whole bunch of other code. ASCII all over the place.

I think it may have been, thanks!